Book cover / AST

The poems collected in the book cover a period of twenty years – from 1995 to 2015. The main content of such a large body of texts was the very possibility of talking about family and personal history against the backdrop of the history of the country.

One of the first sections of the book, “The Female Person,” was written back in Yeltsin’s Russia and is today perceived as one of the mirrors of the 1990s, an era of quickly curtailed initiatives and freedoms. On the deceptive horizon of Russian society, still just awakening from the Soviet past, the need for self-determination loomed: “and everyone wants to know, tyskemiktotakovsky.” The need for identity as a defense mechanism, like the craving for private property, was stored in the basements of the Soviet subconscious. In Stepanova’s poems, self-awareness begins with criticism of the image of women and the feminine in Russian society in the 1990s: “Feminine. Babish. / From under the sarafan. / Slave” or descriptions of the feminine as a commodity, a feast for others: “covering her face, like a holiday table, / with lipstick, black glasses.” The process of historical awareness is described in the poem “Me, Mom, Grandma, May 9,” which turns the pages of women’s history of the war: “The first embrace, / We sit together in a single dress.” Clothing becomes a symbol of common history for representatives of three generations, a connection between the living and the dead through a common catastrophe. The national holiday turns into a family, deeply personal event, giving birth to the memory of specific people, and not of a victory marred by victims.

The heroes of Stepanova's ballads and songs are looking for their time amidst utter uncertainty and oblivion: "Will I wake up as who? What gender?" or "Stop, whoever is walking, I will stand and forget." In Stepanova's poems, the voices of the most diverse people are freed from the power of formulas, ready-made images, decisions, and actions. On the pages of the book "Against Lyrics," the main figure of our time is formed - a witness, someone who can tell about something other than himself. Private memory, diaries, recollections, quotes, as the most tenacious part of culture, become a shadow, the material for almost any poem by Stepanova.

The book separately presents two poems from 2014–2015: Spolia and “War of Beasts and Animals” – a reflection on the horror in Ukraine: “the left bank of the war is occupied by Jews, / On the right bank, faggots stand like a wall. / This battle is fought on foot, it will never end.” In the endless war as a new state of affairs, poetry becomes the anthropological weapon that allows a person to comprehend the catastrophic experience in the world, “where you involuntarily become a poet” – a witness, a mediator, an interpreter, showing that history has long since left the textbooks and entered the streets and lives in each of us. This is what Stepanova writes about, finding herself outside of lyricism, outside the experience of one person, on the side of the disenfranchised dead and the living, who with their minds and bodies comprehend that “across my entire territory / a five-minute history is coming.”

Maria Stepanova. Against the lyrics. Moscow: AST, 2017

Maria Stepanova performed "Against the lyrics"